by Neil Joslin
Poor Roger Clemens.
I think it’s a crying shame that he is facing jail time for allegedly lying about steroid use and his involvement with illegal substances, while playing major league baseball. And as far as I’m concerned the two biggest culprits in this entire affair are his mom and dad, who allowed their little boy to decide on a career as a professional ball player instead of something more disgusting like… oh let’s say a politician.
What’s that, you ask? Are you out of your mind? I know it sounds a bit bizarre but as Alan J. Lerner and Fredrick Loewe once observed, ‘in Camelot, that’s how conditions are.’ Allow me to ‘splain this one to you, Lucy. It is entirely understandable that a young Roger Clemens might decide to become a major league pitcher as a small child. Back in those days, professional ball players were relatively sheltered from the public because the news media hadn’t become the 900-pound gorilla that cable news channels and 24-hour sports coverage has made it.
Back when Clemens was a kid, major league baseball players were considered heroes. In those days, very few stories ever surfaced about drunken ball players, their questionable behavior or the fact that they were ball players and not ‘role models.’ In fact, many of the most revered players were anything but role models. But nobody cared. Ball players just played ball. It was a game. It was an escape from the daily grind of every day living and almost every small boy in America wanted to play professional ball. And every parent in America put their kids to bed at night with the assurance that if they worked hard enough, and became good enough, one day they could be become a ball player or even president.
Fast-forward thirty years. ESPN, FOX Sports, NBC, ABC, CBS every local, regional and national radio and television sports show on earth is busy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, doing nothing but digging up all the dirt they can find on every professional athlete in the universe. We’re not just talking baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer and bowling. We’re talking about every inconsequential sporting event and every non-descript athlete on the planet. Free agency has made it difficult to follow any one professional team for more than one season because all the players go trolling for bigger contracts almost every year and rosters change just as fast. College sports are also ever changing and big money contracts for television and radio coverage are making it hard to even follow BYU sports.
The bottom line is that with so much time to fill with so much sports news, on so many channels, in so many cities with so many people paying attention to what so many sports reporters are saying, being a professional athlete is like living in a glass house, next door to the biggest busybody in town and you like to walk around in your underwear. Everybody in town is going to know what kind, color and style of underwear you wear, and what you do while wearing your underwear. And somehow, everyone wants to know.
So, when Roger Clemens decided to become a professional ball player as a child, the chronological timeline of his career placed him smack dab in the middle of this sports coverage revolution. It ensured that at some point in his career, he would be placed under a media microscope so powerful that even if he lived in concrete bunker, some reporter would discover whether he wore boxers or briefs. And in the age of mass media conjecture about whether athletes are cheating with the use of steroids and other drugs, his timing couldn’t have been worse.
And finally, we must consider that so many politicians and bureaucrats in America spend so much of their time playing CYA to hide their lies and outright crimes from the American people. And to do this, they take full advantage of every opportunity to deflect blame and attention away from themselves. And, since most Americans are more concerned with whether Brett Favre is going to pass a football for another season in the NFL, than whether congress is going to pass another 2400-page piece of bailout legislation; when elected officials in Washington can trump up some stupid, insignificant charges about a famous professional athlete, whose career is over, and convince enough of the American sheeple that this is vital to the fabric of America, then they are home free for a while longer.
So, forget the economy, healthcare, taxes, inflation and the total government takeover of America. Roger Clemens is going to have to answer for his alleged crimes. But I will sleep as well tonight as my knee surgery allows me to because I discouraged my kids from becoming professional athletes in this era of guilty until proven innocent. They might not be as wealthy as Roger Clemens, but they are getting a lot less airtime and they won’t be testifying before congress anytime soon. A congress that hides its incompetence by persecuting a ball player whose influence on America’s history is comparatively insignificant. A ball player, whose indiscretions, even if they were true, would likely have been overlooked had he become a politician.
